Simon Prebble

In the 1840s, Charles Dickens wrote 5 short stories with strong social and moral messages. The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home, is the third of these stories. Following the home life of John Peerybingle, the story introduces the many people in John's family and life along with a cricket that acts as the guardian angel of the family. Like its predecessors, this story also contains heavy social and moral implications. However, it differs...

Featuring the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai-degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and general knave-about-Piccadilly-Something Nasty In the Woodshed is, chronologically, the third in the Mortdecai trilogy, after Don't Point That Thing at Me and After You With the Pistol, although written second. The players are, once again, Charlie, Johanna, and Jock (the thuggish anti-Jeeves), and there is plenty of liquor,...

Utopia, by Sir Thomas More, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary...

One-time police detective Peter Diamond loses his job as a security guard when he fails to spot a small Japanese child hiding in the furniture department of Harrods. Weeks later, she's still unclaimed; Diamond is unable to forget the frightened eyes of the silent little girl and takes on the challenge of uncovering her identity. Now Diamond is back in the sleuthing business, following a trail that leads from London to New York to Tokyo and to a shocking...

Scotland Yard Detective Joe Sandilands investigates the murder of a teacher at a boys' boarding school and discovers that students have gone missing from the school for years and their disappearances have not been questioned.

The environment has long been the undisputed territory of the political Left, which casts international capitalism, consumerism, and the overexploitation of natural resources as the principle threats to the planet and sees top-down interventions as the most effective solution. In How to Think Seriously about the Planet, Roger Scruton rejects this view and offers a fresh approach to tackling the most important political problem of our time. He contends...

You are a secret agent working for the British in Berlin. You are due to go home on leave, but you are being followed. A man meets you in the theater and briefs you on a plot to revive the power of Nazi Germany. The next day you make contact with a beautiful girl who may know something. Someone tries to kill both of you. You are Quiller, spy extraordinaire.

In Churchill, critically acclaimed historian Paul Johnson explores the complex and fascinating character of Winston Churchill-the soldier, orator, and statesman who shined brightest during Britain's darkest hours. From his forays into the far-flung corners of the empire as cavalry officer and correspondent to his warnings of impending crisis as historian and Parliamentarian, Churchill faced the winds and tides of change with remarkable versatility...

On August 24, 1939, the world held its collective breath as Hitler and Stalin signed the now infamous nonaggression pact, signaling an imminent invasion of Poland and daring Western Europe to respond. In this dramatic account of the final days before the outbreak of World War II, award-winning historian Richard Overy vividly chronicles the unraveling of peace, hour by grim hour, as politicians and ordinary citizens brace themselves for a war that...

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany was the Mecca of science and technology in the world. However, by the beginning of the First World War, Germany began to display some of the features that would blight the conduct of ideal science through the rest of the century.After Hitler came into power in 1933, science and technology were quickly pressed into service by racist, xenophobic idealologies. From 1939 to the war's end, scientists...